The Talent Code
🔗Connect
🔼Topic:: Mastery
✒️ Note-Making
💡Clarify
🔈 Summary of main ideas
- The mind is flexible - whenever we are faced with a difficult recurring process, this is when our mind will focus resources on doing it better each time, by isolating the neurons with myelin.
- learning requires deep motivation - since learning is by definition hard, we need a deep source of motivation, which is our identity. We need to believe we could become the person we want to be.
🗒️Relate
⛓ Life lessons, action items
🔍Critique
✅ by following this method, what will happen?
❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong... The book really lacks in it's "so what". For example, knowing that it's all about myelin doesn't change a thing because it's just the way learning is manifested in our brain, so the focus should be on the process that has led to it, not the biological outcome. Also many of the stories lack a "so what" bottom line, and it is clearly difficult to bring back to your own life.
We are left mostly empty handed
🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... There are barely any methods of implementation
🗨️Review
💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... This book is written as a passion project by the writer, but more often than not misses it's goal. The stories are what he really wanted to talk about, and sometimes forgets to tie it back to talent. A combination of ADHD and the desire to showoff his stories rather than research and conclusions. All this leaves us with little to go on, and forces us to guess what the lesson should be
📒 Notes
Introduction
Talent is not born, it is grown. Talent on the molecular level is myelin. The insolation around neurons that allow them to fire faster and smoother, which is expressed through a stronger manifestation of an action, aka talent. More myelin = more Competence.
- The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become. (Location 102)
- Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. (Location 106)
Deep Practice
The Sweet Spot
Developing talent can't be effortless. It is precisely where we are met with Challenge that we develop the most. The goal is to find the sweet spot between too easy and too hard. learning should be hard
Another crucial aspect is simulations where we chunk the skill into small components that can be tested and trained in rapid succession in a safe environment. A place of experimentation and improvisation chunking simulations
- operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. (Location 215)
- “We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that's wrong,” he said. “It's a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.” (Location 229)
- The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does. (Location 233)
The Deep Practice Cell
Myelin is the key for performance, it is the glue in "practice makes perfect". Every skill relies on a message firing in the brain, and myelin makes that message faster, stronger, better. The more we practice a trait, the more we fire the same route, that signals the brain that this route is important, which causes dedication of resources to that route, slowly expanding it and covering it up with myelin. To fire it effectively requires that we face difficulties first. If the route is "good enough", there will be no development. We need to do it slowly, to face our mistakes, and tough challenges, and repeat the process until we achieve Mastery. spaced repetition failure
our ability to produce myelin fades over time. Also, since it is a living tissue, we have to continue to practice otherwise it will tear down
- Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. (Location 405)
- The more the nerve fires, the more myelin wraps around it. The more myelin wraps around it, the faster the signals travel, increasing velocities up to one hundred times (Location 507)
- in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. (Location 544)
- “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses. (Location 642)
The Bronte's the Zboys and the Renaissance
A genius isn't born, it's made. All of the famous "sudden genius" actually hide a history of training and failing behind it.
It all goes back to myelin and how our body interacts with the world. Preprogramming skills is useful for limited, simple situations, like running from a lion, or avoiding rotten food. But for complex skills such as analysis or juggling, preprogramming would simply be very expensive, especially when the needs of survival change with time (being a good farmer was essential 300 years ago, but not now). That's why we have developed the ability to adapt on the stop, to detect using repetition and difficulty where we need resources the most, and with myelin and neurons we are able to generate strong skills in a flexible way neuroplasticity
- When we acquire higher skills, we are co-opting this ancient adaptive mechanism to our individual ends, an event made possible by the fact that our genes let us—or more accurately, they let our needs and our actions—determine what skills we grow. This system is flexible, responsive, and economical, because it gives all human beings the innate potential to earn skill where they need it. (Location 913)
- we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might ever presume to guess. (Location 922)
The Three Rules of Deep Practice
Having a skill is partially expressed by having useful Mental Shortcuts like recognizing words instead of letters.
The process of deep practice includes:
- Chunking - breaking the task down to it's core components
- Repetition - repeat it
- Love it - you have to learn to "feel" it, to develop intuition. Doing mistakes should bother you.
- Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking. (Location 990)
- First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture. (Location 1026)
- Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading, imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit. (Location 1126)
- Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. (Location 1138)
Ignition
Primal Cues
Deep practice is not fun, it requires a lot of motivation to maintain. Where does this motivation comes from?
One suggestion is "primal cues", a preexisting motivation before the beginning of your training, that stems from a strong Narratives of your life. For example, being an orphan could create a narrative of "you are not safe", which would drive you towards being more in control of your surroundings. Similarly, having an older sibling can transmit the message "you have to do better", never to rest until you surpass them.
These cues don't have to be so dramatic or destined, they can be generated. A strong message that goes out to the identity, to your core, instead of external or superficial rewards, is the way. (Aka:: change starts from within)
- deep practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel, (Location 1239)
- Where deep practice is all about staggering-baby steps, ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that lead us to say that is who I want to be. (Location 1287)
- It's not as simple as saying I want X. It's saying something far more complicated: I want X later, so I better do Y like crazy right now. We speak of motivation as if it's a rational assessment of cause and effect, but in fact it's closer to a bet, and a highly uncertain one at that. (Location 1349)
The Curacao Experiment
Praise effort, not intelligence. It is the ground level words that focus on struggle and effort that brings motivation, not high level dreams and aspirations growth mindset
- high motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle. (Location 1771)
How to Ignite a Hotbed
When a place creates an identity that is built around achievable goals, that encompasses every part of life, and that is coherent in it's entirety, that's a healthy environment for promoting motivation for change, like a school that it's whole goal is getting kids to college, where everything they do serves that purpose and nothing else.
Master Coaching
The Talent Whisperer
To be a great mentor is to be like a farmer. It is more about connection and knowledge rather than inspiring leadership. Detect their potential and their errors, and repeat until success.
The Teaching Circuit, a Blueprint
A good coach needs expertise, perceptiveness, adjustability and connection with the student.